Radio was the first form of mass communication that did not demand literacy, and as such, its served as a powerful tool for news delivery and educating the public. However, over time, consuming real-time long form audio content has changed dramatically.
For much of the 20th century, AM and FM radio was the cornerstone of daily commutes. It was standard background noise in offices, cars, and public transport. Yet, it has now taken a major back seat.
To say that it faces competition from modern media forms would be wrong, as these have essentially killed traditional radio. The number of global podcast listeners appears to be increasing at an annual rate of over 6%, with the audiobook market growing at almost 24% per year. Moreover, social media platforms, modern streaming services, and localized gaming sites like Wildz Canada have also done their part to kill commercial radio.
People nowadays want on-demand entertainment. They also look to multitask, underscoring a broader move toward interactivity. Audio isn’t just heard today; podcasters run live streams where they interact with users active in a public chat, and various primarily audio-based platforms intertwine visual elements for a more robust and immersive experience. Hybrid content models are emerging, as people and their habits/preferences change. That is what we are exploring below, how interactive entertainment became the IN thing.
The Podcast Explosion – Every Niche Satisfied
Despite popular belief, Internet audio shows have been around since the 1990s. They became a thing right after the Internet debuted. Nonetheless, at that time, they did not bear the name podcasts. They really had no specific name at all. One of the first ones, if not the initial Internet audio show, was Internet Talk Radio by Carl Malamud. Then came the RealAudio era, which implemented the still active RealAudio Player, meant for super-compressed audio-video files.
In the late 1990s, MP3 downloads became more commonplace, and in the 2000s, online audio interviews, which were chiefly available for download, started to become more mainstream. These used RSS feeds to distribute downloads, with the Daily Source Code hosted by Dave Winer and Adam Curry often cited as the Web’s first official podcast.
Over time, these shows morphed from fringe hobbies to profitable endeavors, a shift that began occurring at the tail end of the 2000s. The surge in popularity of podcasts seen in the 2010s came from the accessibility to smartphones and the Internet provided, and they slowly displaced traditional radio during peak listening windows.
In 2024, Grand View Research, an industry research firm, claimed that this sphere pulled in $30 billion in revenues, and that it was on track to swell this number to $131 billion by 2030.
Without question, this medium exploded on account of its ability to cater to hyper-specific niche interests, with true crime emerging as its juggernaut category. Another pod appeal lies in the intimacy these show provide, making listeners feel like they are among a select few tuning in.
The interactivity element here comes into play with most of these shows accepting user feedback, questions, running live polls, active chat participants getting reward badges, instilling an in-the-moment consumption ethos, where more than half listeners dive into episodes immediately upon discovery. Sophisticated algorithms feed listeners with recommendations based on listening history, the time of day, and even diving into users’ playlists.
Music Personalization – The Right Audio at the Right Time
On the topic of personalization, listening to music has drastically changed over the past fifteen years or so. In the past, when software like WinAmp was all the rage, people would spend hours curating playlists. Today, algorithms do this in a second, using context-aware listening to build playlists so ideal that most people could not have put together for themselves.
Top streaming services like Spotify and YouTube do a terrific job of digging up songs users listened to several years back but have forgotten. They too have interactive features like AI DJs with voice cloning, collaborative playlists, and real-time lyric videos, and more. These extend sessions by a significant margin.
Thus, now, listeners are expecting that services will anticipate their needs, and they become frustrated if they do not do a good job at this. Hyper-personalization also has a downside in people not organically discovering new music. That means they do not have as deep emotional connections with music as they once had, and this turns most songs into passive tunes, on-repeat trending jams, or tailored event-specific soundtracks. The latter, too, refers to personalized soundscapes that can get built using AI. These have become popular on YouTube and do require some tech-savviness to get created.
Interactive Audiobooks – A Different Way to Consume Literary Fiction
What does this mean? Well, this is a subset of modern fiction on digital platforms, where elements like branching narratives, real-time listener choices, and adaptive soundscapes get incorporated.
Physical books with branching narratives have long been a thing, with Consider the Consequences, published in the 1930s, often being cited as one of the first examples of this genre. Though the Choose Your Own Adventure series brought this style to the mainstream, today, this format is available in an audio-visual form.
Netflix’s Black Mirror experimented with it with its interactive film Bandersnatch, but many audiobooks have done a better job at this, giving listeners multiple paths to completing a story.
There are also multiple famous audiobooks, like Audible Originals like The Decision and Escape Room, which are interactive audio stories, where the listeners choose between story branches at key moments in the narrative. When such crossroads come, the app/platform pauses the story, asking the listener what a character should do next.
Many who are fans of this genre got introduced to it via the 2011 groundbreaking game The Nightjar, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, which was a sci-fi title that used sound cues only. Hence, it was a video game, but with no video, one that emphasized audio immersion, and was way ahead of its time by multiple parameters.
